Community Guidelines

What this map is

The community layer of WiFi Map is a shared, user-built directory of public and venue WiFi: places where a person can reasonably expect to get online, contributed by people who have actually been there.

It is not a directory of every network in existence, and it is emphatically not a directory of anyone's home. The value of the dataset is precisely that it is limited to networks whose operators intend them to be used by visitors.

These Guidelines form part of the Terms of Use and sit alongside the Acceptable Use Policy. Accepting the Terms is a precondition of contributing anything, and the App asks you to confirm this before your first submission.

1 What We Accept

Contribute a hotspot when it is a network the operator offers to customers, guests or the public:

Open networks with no password are welcome and useful — a location alone is a valid contribution. You never have to attach a password to contribute.

2 What We Reject

These are removed on sight and, when repeated, cost the contributor their ability to contribute.

2.1 Private networks

• Homes and private residences — including your own, including with the password omitted. A home's SSID and location together is personal information about the people who live there.
• Neighbours' networks, whether or not they are secured.
• Personal hotspots and phone tethering networks.
• Employer, client, school or institutional networks without written authorisation from that organisation.

2.2 Networks not meant for visitors

• Staff, back-office, POS, CCTV, building-management or IoT networks, even at a public venue.
• Enterprise (802.1X) networks requiring individual credentials.
• Paid, voucher, per-room or per-session access — sharing these circumvents the operator's commercial arrangement.
• Networks behind a captive portal where you are publishing a means of bypassing it.

2.3 Bad data

• Fabricated, guessed or "probably right" entries.
• Networks you have not personally used.
• Duplicates of an entry that already exists.
• Entries placed at the wrong location, or placed deliberately to mislead.
• Placeholder, test or joke submissions.

2.4 Objectionable content

Free-text fields — venue names, notes, report reasons — must not contain:

• abuse, harassment, threats, or content targeting a person or group;
• hate speech, or content demeaning anyone on the basis of a protected characteristic;
• sexual content, sexually suggestive material, or anything involving minors;
• content promoting violence, self-harm, terrorism, or illegal goods and services;
• personal information about any identifiable individual — names, phone numbers, addresses, vehicle registrations;
• advertising, spam, referral links, or promotional text;
• impersonation of a business, brand or person;
• anything unlawful where you are, or where the venue is.

3 Quality Standards

An entry is useful only if a stranger can act on it. Aim for:

If an entry is out of date, the right response is to vote it down or report it, not to create a duplicate.

4 Passwords

Attaching a password is optional and always the highest-risk part of a contribution. The full rules are in Acceptable Use §5. In short:

The contribution flow requires you to tick a box confirming you have permission to share. That tick is a legal attestation under the Terms of Use, not a formality. Ticking it falsely is a breach of the Terms and may expose you to liability.

How shared credentials are stored

Community passwords are held encrypted on our server and delivered per hotspot on request, rather than being baked into the public map tiles. This is deliberate: it means a takedown actually works. Revoking one record removes it everywhere, instead of it surviving in every tile every device has already downloaded.

5 Privacy of Others

A map of networks is, structurally, a map of places people are. We take the following positions and enforce them:

• No homes. Not with a password, not without one, not "anonymised". This is the single rule most strictly enforced.
• No full BSSIDs. The App transmits only the manufacturer prefix, and the server rejects a full MAC address outright rather than truncating it. A full BSSID is a stable, unique identifier for a specific access point.
• Coordinates are rounded to five decimal places on the device before they are sent, deliberately removing the last metre of precision.
• No names of people anywhere in a contribution — not in the venue name, not in the notes.
• No SSIDs that identify a person. If a network name is somebody's name, do not map it. It is by definition not a venue network.
• No use of the map to find anyone. Using contributions, signal readings or scan data to locate or track an individual is a breach of the Acceptable Use Policy and results in a permanent block.

6 Votes & Reports

Voting and reporting are what keep the dataset honest, so they have rules of their own.

• Vote from experience. "Works" means you connected. "Doesn't work" means you tried and could not.
• Do not vote strategically — to promote a venue you are connected with, or to bury a competitor's.
• Do not automate votes or reports, and do not coordinate them.
• Report accurately. Choose the reason that actually applies. A report used as a complaint about a venue's coffee wastes moderation time that a genuine takedown needs.
• Do not use reports as a weapon. Mass-reporting valid entries is itself a violation.

Vote and report volume from a single install is rate-limited. Manipulation is detectable and is treated as abuse of the dataset.

7 How Moderation Works

Moderation runs continuously and combines automated signals with human review, as Google Play's User Generated Content policy requires of apps in this category.

1. Submission. Every new entry enters a pending state. Pending entries are not published to other users.
2. Automated checks. The server rejects malformed submissions outright — a full BSSID, unrounded coordinates, an over-length field, a submission exceeding the per-install rate limit, or a request whose signature does not verify.
3. Corroboration. A pending entry goes live once distinct installs confirm it works, or after manual approval. One person cannot publish an entry alone.
4. Continuous scoring. Live entries carry a quality score derived from votes, freshness and speed samples. An entry that stops working decays out of the map without anyone needing to intervene.
5. Automatic flagging. Accumulated negative reports move an entry to flagged, which suppresses it from the published tiles pending review.
6. Human review. Flagged and reported entries are reviewed by us. We approve, edit, reclassify or delete.
7. Republication. Tiles are rebuilt on a schedule and replaced atomically, never merged. A removed entry disappears from devices rather than lingering in a stale local cache.

Our response targets

8 Reporting Content

Report anything that breaches these Guidelines. You do not need to be affected by it and you do not need to justify it.

Reports are confidential. The contributor is not told who reported an entry, and contributors are not identifiable to other users in the first place.

9 If You Own the Network

You have an absolute right to have your network removed, and you do not have to explain why.

You may also ask us to remove only the password while leaving the location, or to correct details rather than delete the entry. Say which you want in the request.

10 Enforcement & Appeals

Consequences scale with what happened:

Appeals

Because there are no accounts, enforcement operates against the random install identifier described in the Privacy Policy. If you believe an entry was removed or a restriction applied in error, email us with your install ID — Settings → About this app, then long-press the version number — and what you think went wrong. We review every appeal and respond within 7 business days. If we got it wrong, we reverse it.

11 What Is Stored When You Contribute

Full detail is in Privacy Policy §7. In summary:

Your install ID is never shown to other users. Contributions appear on the map without any attribution.

12 Contact

Publisher

Epsilon Developers

Operated by

Satyam Kushwaha & Anurag Mahajan

Country

India

Moderation & appeals

contact@epsilondevelopers.xyz